The Shield and the Hourglass

Morning mist drifted through the courtyard like breath on glass, softening the edges of stone and ivy. Elara stood in the center of the training ring, the heels of her boots planted on pale cobblestones warmed by the first light of day. Her hands were steady. Her voice was not.

“Lux serena,” she whispered, and the little sphere in her palm flickered into being. It was a weak glow, pale as a dying coal. She poured more effort into it. The light shivered, then sputtered out, leaving her with an empty hand and the quickened beat of failure behind her ribs.

Master Valerius watched from beneath the archway, the hood of his dark robe thrown back, his silver hair pulled neatly at the nape. His eyes—grey and sharp—did not waver. He never raised his voice, and he didn’t now. “Again.”

Elara swallowed. The morning air was cool, but her neck felt damp beneath her braid. The village beyond the courtyard stirred into life: the sound of a distant market cart, the clatter of pails, the low conversation of two gardeners greeting each other at the gate. Silverwood always felt so sure of itself. In contrast, Elara’s certainty was thinner than the veil of mist.

She set her shoulders. “Lux serena.” The sensation of drawing a thread through a needle. Focus. Breathe. The glow returned, a small pearly flame hovering above her palm. It trembled, strong for a breath, then flared too bright and popped like a soap bubble. Her breath caught on a sigh she didn’t let loose.

“Your intent is scattered,” Valerius said. “You are reaching for the outcome instead of inhabiting the action.” His steps were quiet as he crossed the stones to stand beside her. He smelled faintly of parchment and fennel. “The light charm is not a performance. It is a conversation.”

Elara nodded, but the words pressed on her like a reminder she’d already memorized and failed to apply. Around the courtyard, creeping vines threw shadows on the wall, and a sparrow hopped along the low ledge as if it, too, was waiting for her to get it right. She set her jaw and summoned a small wire of magic into her fingers again.

Her mother had always said Elara’s talent would bloom late. “You’re a slow-burn, sweet,” she’d whisper in the lamplight when Elara returned from the academy with her shoulders tight and her eyes raw. Slow-burn was romantic when you were ten and the world was still blush-colored. It felt different at twenty, with the names of prodigies carved into the tower’s ledger and your own entries neat but forgettable.

“Lux—” The word snagged against anxiety. She pushed past it. “Serena.” A soft glow brightened. She coaxed it outward, aware of Valerius’s presence like a weight beside her. Almost there. Hold steady. The glow pulsed, oval and clean, no larger than an egg, but consistent. A dull happiness rose in her chest.

“Better,” Valerius murmured. He didn’t smile often. Approval from him felt like a sunrise you didn’t expect. “Now move it through space. Do not let it break.”

She willed the light to float forward from her hand. It obeyed at first, drifting to hover above the cobbles. The air hummed against her skin, a faint prickling. She tracked it with her gaze, breathing as evenly as she could. She imagined a thread between her chest and the sphere, imagined it anchored there, steady. It bobbed over the edge of a fallen leaf, casting a milky halo over the veins.

Then a cart rumbled somewhere close, and the jolt of sound tugged her attention—just a fraction—away. The light wobbled and guttered. She grabbed at it with her will, too fast, and it stuttered out. Failure again, quiet but complete.

Heat rose into her face. She pressed her lips together and counted to three. The old courtyard well stood over her shoulder, its rope coiled neatly on the post, the bucket steady as anything. Elara wished for that steadiness.

“You are eager to please,” Valerius said, not unkindly. “Eagerness is not the same as focus.”

“I know,” she said, and hated how thin her voice sounded. She dragged the back of her wrist over her temple, pushing away a flyaway strand. “It’s only a light charm. I should be able to do this by reflex.”

“Reflex is earned. Familiarity comes with repetition.” He angled her shoulders with the lightest touch. “Again.”

She did it again. She did it again after that. The slip of energy between her ribs and the tips of her fingers became easier to hold, then the ease frayed, then returned. She kept her face smooth, but frustration collected like a tight knot beneath her breastbone. Across the courtyard, two novice mages laughed softly as they carried jars of herbs toward the tower’s side door. Their light orbs were bright and steady, casual lanterns above their heads. Elara watched them by accident, the muscle in her cheek twitching.

“Eyes on your task,” Valerius said, and she jerked her gaze back to the pale halo she had coaxed into life again. It brightened obediently when she paid it attention. She let out a breath, slow and steady.

“Feels like I’m trying to hold water in a sieve,” she said before she could stop herself.

Valerius’s mouth tipped, not quite a smile. “Then change the sieve.” He stepped back, folding his hands. “Your problem is not capacity. It is confidence. You must decide you can bear the light.”

The words struck something deep and tender. Elara bit down on the urge to confess the smallness she felt, the way her name sounded plain in her own mind beside legends carved on plaques in the Hall. She drew in a long breath and tried to believe him for one minute. The light steadied, and for a moment it was perfect—warm and whole, a sphere the size of her fist, a clean white glow that cast a sure shadow at her feet.

Valerius nodded once. “Good. Hold it.”

She held it until her palms prickled and her shoulders ached. When at last it slipped, it did so like a sigh, thinning until it threaded itself into nothing. Elara blinked against the emptiness, the courtyard suddenly too ordinary without the soft glow.

“We will end here,” Valerius said. “You will practice before evening. Ten minutes every hour.”

Her stomach dipped. Every hour left little time for anything else. But she bowed her head. “Yes, Master.”

He gestured toward the bench under the archway. A clay jar sat there, cool and beaded. “Water. Then your chores. The wards on the east path need maintenance. And Elara—” She looked up, and he studied her face. “The village is not a ledger. No one is tallying your worth against others. Be kinder to yourself.”

“Yes,” she said again, softer, unsure if she could believe it. It was easier to hold an orb of light than a kind thought about herself.

After he left, she sank onto the bench and drank. The water was crisp, almost sweet. In the square beyond the gate, two children ran, their bare feet flashing. A woman strung garlands across a stall, the bright heads of marigolds bobbing as she tied them. The festival would begin by dusk. Silverwood would glow with lanterns and laughter and the swing of music under the old weirwood branches. She had promised to help set charms on the lanterns, and the thought pinched her. All those faces. All those eyes.

She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the cool air lay against her damp skin. Every hour. Ten minutes. She could do that. Maybe by evening, the light would obey without trembling. Maybe it would feel less like a fight and more like that easy suspension she sometimes reached when her breath and will matched.

When she opened her eyes again, the mist had thinned. Sunlight spilled hot and clean into the courtyard, turning the stones bright. Elara stood, adjusted the tie of her braid, and flexed her fingers as if shaking out doubt from knuckles and tendons. Then she lifted her hand.

“Lux serena,” she said to the empty air, and began again.

The weirwood line ran like a silvered spine along Silverwood’s eastern edge. Kael walked it the way he always did—measured steps on the packed earth, eyes never resting long in one place. The morning had shaken off its mist and settled into a bright, brittle clarity. Birds worried at seeds in the grasses. A hare darted and froze, darted again. He counted the guard posts without thinking, counted the beats between the calls of the sentries stationed at the northern turn, counted the rhythm of the village waking behind him.

He wore his leather and steel like a second skin, the weight so familiar he forgot it until the buckle pulled when he breathed too deep. His sword knocked gently against his thigh. In the distance, a farmer’s cart creaked, the oxen’s low grumble a bass note under the chatter of two girls setting out jars on a roadside stall. This morning felt like any other, and that was a comfort he trusted only so far.

When he reached the oldest weirwood, he slowed. The tree towered above him, a column of pale bark streaked with living veins, its canopy wide and thick with leaves that glowed faintly even in ordinary light. He had stood beneath it as a boy and felt small in a way that had made him straighten his spine and press his palms flat to his sides. He felt no smaller now, only more responsible for the ground beneath his boots and the breaths taken within earshot.

The thing that caught his eye was not obvious at first. The trunk looked healthy. The leaves did not sag. But at the base, where roots knuckled out of the earth, a patch of grey crept across the soil like ash spilled and not brushed away. The grass there had lost its green, turned a color like old milk. He squatted, his shadow falling over the patch, and laid the back of his fingers near it. The air above it felt cooler than it should.

He let his fingertips graze the edge of a leaf that had fallen and landed half in the grey, half out. The side in the grey was brittle, the veins stark as if drawn in charcoal. He turned the leaf, testing the texture. No mold. No rot. A wrongness without softness. He rubbed the leaf between his fingers; the part that had touched the grey flaked, powdering his skin. He wiped it on his trousers and watched the dust streak.

“You see something?” Toren’s voice came from behind him, one of the younger sentries, his tone light, unaware of the quiet snag in Kael’s attention.

Kael stood, brushing his hand on his glove again. “Clear enough,” he said. He pointed with his chin. “Watch the line. Report if you see any animals acting strange.”

Toren shifted, followed the glance to the base of the tree, and frowned. “What’s that?”

“Could be nothing.” Kael’s voice was even, casual because he chose it to be. “Frost took odd last season. Remember that week?” He watched Toren’s shoulders ease minutely. “You posted at the north break?”

“Yes, Captain.” Toren straightened. “Clear so far. Old man Ivar says the rabbits are bold. They keep getting into his beets.”

“Rabbits are always bold.” Kael clapped him once on the shoulder, the contact brief and grounding. “Hold your route.”

When Toren moved on, Kael crouched again. He didn’t like the way the grey sat on the ground as if it had seeped from within rather than been brought by wind or spill. He traced the roots with his eye, looking for any sign of insect nests or burrowing. He found none. The weirwoods were hardy, more so than any other growth on this side of the valley. They soaked up light and gave it back, stubborn and sure, their luminous sap an old comfort on winter nights when the fog pressed close. He had never seen one shadowed by anything earthbound.

He stood and walked the circumference of the tree, bootheels crunching over last year’s husks. The patch of grey extended only a handspan from the root in one place, a smear in another, then stopped as cleanly as if someone had drawn a line and decided not to cross it. He thought of children chalking boundaries for games. He thought of lines that meant something because people believed they did.

He pulled a small leather notebook from the pouch at his belt and sketched the base of the tree, a rough map, noting the shape of the grey against the root flare. He marked the time. He wrote: cold. brittle leaf. no moisture. He almost added: wrong, and stopped himself. He did not have patience for words that told him only what he felt.

He glanced up through the leaves. The light shifted through them in a slow wave as the breeze moved, dappling his face. In the village, a bell clanged once, then twice—first warning for noon chores. He slipped the pencil back and tucked the notebook away.

He walked on to the next tree, and the next. Two stood clean. On the fourth, another smear at the base. Smaller. He crouched again and touched his knuckles to the dirt beside it, then the patch itself. The cold was not imagined. He stood, jaw tight.

He could take this to Valerius. He could send a runner to fetch the old man and his herb-scented robe, tell him to lay a palm on the bark and murmur something that would ease the knot in Kael’s chest. But the village thrived on its own stories. The weirwoods were not to be fussed over. The last time a blight had come, it had been a brown rot that the farmers had handled with ash and prayer and a cup of something bitter poured into the ground. The Guard had not been needed. Panic made people clumsy. Clumsy people got hurt.

He rubbed his thumb along the ridge of his sword hilt. There were always small oddities at the turn of a season—an early freeze, a late hatch, a field that yielded thin. He’d learned to mark them without announcing them, learned to keep the rhythm of the village steady. If there was a pattern, it would reveal itself soon enough.

He made his mental note and sharpened it until it sat clean and ready in his mind’s ledger. East weirwood, root base, grey patch, cold—check again at dusk. Adjust patrols to swing tighter along the trees. Add another pair at night, someone steady who wouldn’t chatter and spook the elders. He could do that without stirring talk.

He set his course along the southern line and lengthened his stride. His gaze cut to every movement in the hedgerows, the flick of a bird’s wing, the ripple of a snake through dry leaves. He didn't quicken his breath or his pulse. He didn’t allow it. His job was a long one, and it required a body that moved heedless of what ached and a mind that held to the path even when it narrowed.

By the time he reached the last marker stone, the sun had lifted, bright and unsoft. The village lay behind him, a scatter of rooftops and smoke threads curling from chimneys. Children’s laughter caught in the air, the sound thin and far but unmistakable. He looked back at the line of weirwoods, the pale bark catching light like bone. The grey at their feet was not visible from here. He still felt its chill against his knuckles.

He set his jaw and turned toward the main road, already slotting the next tasks into place: change the midday watch, speak to Toren about his stance, check the tower’s western gate latch that had stuck last week. He would pass by the weirwood again before the lanterns were lit. He would look at the roots in the different light. He told himself it would look the same and matter less when the evening warmth took hold.

He did not believe it fully. He didn’t need to. It was enough to mark it and move. His instincts rarely shouted. They pressed, quiet and insistent, and he had learned to hear them even when the world was calm and bright and pretending to be safe. He ran two fingers over the edge of his gauntlet, a small, grounding habit, and let the village swallow him as he stepped back toward its heart.

By late afternoon the green at the village center had filled with the clatter and color of the harvest festival. Banners stitched with suns and wheatsheaves lifted and dropped in the breeze. Tables sagged under pies and loaves and jars of preserves gleaming like captured sunset. Fiddles and pipes tangled in a bright, slightly off-tempo song, and children ran from stall to stall with sticky hands, cheeks flushed.

Elara stood at the edge of the fountain, the shallow stone basin scrubbed clear and filled that morning, the surface glass-smooth except for the plink of a spout. She could feel the way attention gathered: the tug of twenty or so pairs of eyes, the expectant hush under the chatter. Her palms were damp. She wiped them on her skirt and lifted her chin.

“You remember the fish,” she told the cluster of children at her feet, forcing brightness into her voice. “From last year? We’ll make them again. Maybe a river.”

“Make a dragon,” a boy with a missing tooth demanded.

“A small dragon,” she agreed, and drew a breath she hoped was steady.

She pictured the shapes in her mind—the braid of currents, the smooth slip of water following her will. It wasn’t advanced magic, not truly, but it required a sure hand. She could get the water to lift. She could not always make it beautiful. Master Valerius had said beauty came with practice and ease. She had never felt ease with an audience.

She moved her fingers in the sequence she had traced a hundred times at her worktable. The water answered, quivering. She felt it through her fingertips like a fine thread drawn taut. She pulled.

The surface rose in a narrow column and spread, a fish body swelling out of shine and air. The children gasped. The sound forked through her—exhilaration, fear. She shaped fins, thin membranes catching light, and nudged one, then another, into a graceful flick.

The fish swam. The younger children squealed and reached, their fingers breaking and re-forming the edges of it without real contact. Elara smiled despite the pressure in her chest and added a second, smaller one. The thread in her mind lengthened. The strain bit behind her eyes.

She glanced up. On the far side of the green, Master Valerius stood near the cider barrels, talking to the baker, his profile turned away. Relief and disappointment twisted together, sharp and familiar. She pulled her focus back down to the water.

“Dragon,” the missing-tooth boy reminded her, loud and impatient.

She hesitated, then set her hands, palms angled, and traced the form she’d practiced in ink: a head like a salamander’s skull, spined, a long neck, a loop of a body. The water lifted in obedience and then wavered. It was heavier than air. It wanted to fall. She pinched more tightly with her will, tightening the thread until it cut.

“Hold still,” she murmured, to herself or to the dragon, she didn’t know.

For a heartbeat the shape coalesced. The spines gleamed like real ridges. The mouth opened, a perfect silent roar. Someone clapped.

Then the thread slipped. It didn’t snap; it went soft, slackening in her grasp. The dragon’s jaw sagged, neck thickening clumsily, and the body lost definition. Fins jerked, then tore from the main form into shapeless ripples.

“No,” she whispered, fingers moving to catch it, but the release had already begun. The column buckled. The two fish collapsed back into the basin with a slap that sent water up and out, sluicing cold onto the toes of the nearest children. They shrieked, first in delight, then in the wobbly letdown of dashed wonder.

Elara stood there with her hands poised and empty, her face hot. “I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice came out thin.

“It was pretty,” a little girl offered, brave and kind.

“Do the lights,” someone else suggested. “The colors. My aunt can do the colors.”

The sting slid behind Elara’s ribs and lodged there. She forced a smile that felt brittle. “Another time,” she said. “I need to… I promised Master Valerius—I should help with the—” She gestured vaguely toward the stalls, toward anywhere that wasn’t here.

She stepped back, then down from the rim of the fountain. Her skirt brushed water and clung to her calves in a cold band. She turned and moved into the press of bodies.

The crowd wrapped around her with the warm, damp crush of festival air: sweat, cinnamon, yeast, the smoke-sour tang of roasted meat. Laughter popped loud too close to her ear. She kept her head slightly bowed and aimed for the gap between two market tables where the shade ran narrower and the world felt less bright.

She didn’t see him until she collided.

Her shoulder struck a wall that moved—a body, solid under leather. The shock ran through her like a struck bell. Hands came up on instinct. One of them, gloved, caught her upper arm, the grip firm but not hurting. The other braced her forearm. She looked up, apology on her tongue, and found Kael’s face close, shadowed by the brim of his hood, eyes steady and dark.

“Watch yourself, mage,” he said.

His voice wasn’t unkind. He didn’t add a name or a warning. Just the three words, clipped, as if he were checking a box on a list. It should have rolled off her; he had said as much to half the village at one time or another. But the timing pressed on fresh bruise. The title landed like a weight on her sternum, and the careful, impersonal distance in his tone turned the heat in her cheeks to something sharp and small.

“Sorry,” she muttered, pulling her arm back from his hand. It left a ghost of warmth on her skin where his fingers had been. She hated that she noticed.

He stepped aside to let her pass, already scanning over her shoulder, the crowd and the edges of the green, always measuring. His gaze skipped back to her once, taking in the damp hem of her skirt and the fine spray darkening her bodice. If there was judgment there, it was hidden well. If there was anything else, she couldn’t see it.

She ducked past him, the space between them narrow enough that her sleeve brushed his bracer, the leather warm from his body. The brush made her aware of herself in a way that unsettled her—of her breath, too quick, of the stray curls that had pulled loose at her temples, of the wet chill on her calves. She kept her eyes down and pushed through the gap he opened, out into a strip of shade beside a shuttered stall.

Somewhere behind her, a child asked a question in a puzzled voice, and an adult answered with a distracted laugh. The fiddles picked up a tune with faster steps. Someone tossed a handful of grain into the air and whooped as it fell around them like a blessing.

Elara leaned once against the rough wall of the stall, just long enough to feel the scrape of wood against her shoulder blades. Then she moved again, head turned so no one would catch her expression, braid tapping her spine as she walked. Her hands were still tingling with the memory of the water’s pull, the hollow where it had slipped away. She told herself she was going to help with the lanterns. She told herself Master Valerius would want her at the tower. Mostly she just wanted to be somewhere no one was watching, where the word mage didn’t feel like a shirt two sizes too big pulled over a body still growing into itself.

Elara reached the tower steps as the sun sank and the shadows lengthened over the green. The festival hum dulled to a distant, uneven throb. In the narrow stairwell, the air cooled, stone holding the day’s chill. She climbed quickly, wanting the familiar clutter of her small room and the thin, clean quiet that followed a day of swallowing too many looks and words.

Her door stuck at the top and gave with a soft groan. The room smelled faintly of beeswax and lavender. She shut the door behind her and leaned her forehead against the wood, eyes closed for a heartbeat. Then she pushed off and crossed to the little table by the window.

Her chronometer lay there where she always kept it, centered on a square of dark cloth to protect the wood. It caught the last light, brass softened with years of handling, glass crystal clear over the small hands and tiny engraved constellations that circled the face. Her parents had given it to her when she’d been accepted to apprentice—“so you never lose track of what matters,” her mother had said, half teasing, half earnest. Elara touched the case with the pad of her finger, a habit as automatic as breathing.

She picked it up. The warmth of her skin bled into the metal. The second hand, a fine sliver tipped in blue, did not move.

She frowned and held it closer. The tiny hand hovered a breath past the twelfth marker, stilling as if arrested mid-step. The hour and minute hands sat at a neat angle that said nearly sunset. She tapped the glass lightly. Nothing.

She turned it over in her palm. The backplate’s engraving—the compass rose her father had etched by hand—caught at the meat of her thumb. Her stomach dipped with a small, irrational panic. It had never stopped. In seven years, it had never once failed her.

She set it down, then picked it up again. The old rituals steadied her: thumb to the lip, index finger to the latch. She eased the lid open and watched the movement inside through the small inner crystal. The gears were delicately nested, an elegant puzzle of golden teeth and coils no wider than a hair. They sat inert. The mainspring’s tension felt wrong when she nudged it gently with her nail—not empty, not taut. Paused.

She swallowed and reached for her kit. She kept it in the top drawer, wrapped in linen, the tools lined up like a row of fine silver fish: tiny screwdriver, tweezers, a loupe, a thin brush. She set them in order and breathed through her nose, slow and even, the way Master Valerius had taught her when her hands shook. Her fingers steadied.

“Just a catch,” she told the air. Her voice sounded too loud.

She unscrewed the back carefully and lifted it away. The exposed innards gleamed in the last light. She eased the balance wheel with the tip of the brush. It did not respond. She felt the faintest prickle at the base of her skull, the kind that came with old wards or a storm far off. She shook it off. Metal. Mechanics. She could fix metal.

She set the chronometer down and flexed her hands. A tiny problem deserved a tiny solution. A minor mending charm, gentler than a breath, a coaxing nudge that would ease whatever misalignment held the gears.

She centered herself, palm hovering over the open back. The words were simple, old and ingrained. She whispered them on an exhale and focused on the shape of motion, on smoothness and start.

Warmth gathered in her hand. It slid down into the brass, a thread she extended delicately. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the balance wheel shivered. Relief edged into her chest. The second hand quivered.

The gears began to move.

Not forward. Back.

The little teeth engaged and spun the wrong way, one after another, a chain reaction that took and multiplied. The coiled spring unwound with a soft, breathy hiss. The second hand streaked counterclockwise, the blue tip a quick blur. The minute hand flicked and followed, jerking backward one notch, then another, then smooth, faster than it had ever moved in her palm.

Elara’s breath caught. She snatched her magic back as quickly as she knew how, clamping down on the thread of warmth, but the motion continued, independent and hungry. The constellations on the dial—the etched points of Orion and the wandering comet—turned in reverse with a fluid grace that had nothing to do with her.

She glanced at the window. The light over the trees did not change. The world outside kept its pace. Her room held steady. Only the little clock ran backward, insistent, as if it had been waiting for the smallest opening to undo.

“Stop,” she said, low and useless, and reached with her fingertip for the crown to arrest the hands.

The instant her skin brushed the metal, the movement halted. The entire mechanism froze mid-rotation. The hush left in the wake of the tiny hiss was complete, as if the room were holding its breath with her.

She drew her hand back slowly. Her heart beat too hard, little jumps against her ribs. The hairs on her arms lifted. She wet her lips and stared at the chronometer, half expecting it to jerk into motion again. It did not.

She listened to the tower, to the world. From below, a faint echo of laughter rose with the smell of spent fire. A moth tapped once against the windowpane and was gone. Her breath fitted itself into the quiet.

She closed the back plate with careful fingers and turned the chronometer over. The face was innocent, the hands tidy. She raised it to her ear like a child, craving the old, reliable tick. Silence met her there, smooth and flat. She set it back down onto its square of cloth and realized her palm was damp, the imprint of the compass rose reddening her skin.

She should go to Master Valerius. She should ask. She should pretend this was a fault of brass and gear and needle, a repair she could request at the next market from a traveling smith. But the sensation that had crawled over her when the gears spun backward settled now into something else, heavy and cold. It was the same wrongness she had felt at the fountain’s edge when the water had slipped through her, the same quiet press she had seen reflected in Kael’s eyes when he scanned the blighted trees. Not cause. Not yet. But a thread, thin and strange, winding through things that should not have touched.

Elara lifted the chronometer again. Her reflection curved in the glass: pale, eyes too wide, a smear of damp hair at her temple. She wanted to wind it. She wanted to force the key and watch the hands jump back into obedient life. She did not move.

She set it down a second time and pushed it gently to the far side of the cloth so it no longer sat precisely centered in its place. The minor imperfection soothed and unsettled in equal measure. She backed away and lowered herself onto the edge of the bed. Her muscles felt hollowed out. She curled her toes against the wooden floorboards and pressed her palms together in her lap until the fine tremor in them eased.

Outside, the festival music faltered and picked up again as a new set of players took over, as if nothing anywhere had slipped a notch. Elara looked at the square of brass on the table. The stopped hands stared back.

When she finally reached up to pinch out the candle, she did it in the dark, by feel. The room fell into a soft, contentless black. She lay down without undressing and kept her eyes open. She listened for a sound that wouldn’t come and felt the shape of missing time rest, cold and patient, beside her.

Sleep didn’t come. The darkness pressed close, not heavy but attentive, like a listening animal. Elara lay still and tried to force her mind to slow, to file away the day into simple boxes: failure at the fountain; Kael’s curt voice; the chronometer—no, don’t think about that. The longer she tried, the more her thoughts looped. The silence became a shape she couldn’t ignore.

She rolled onto her side and stared toward the window. The shutters were unlatched, pulled to but not closed, letting in a thin seam of night. The frame was a pale outline against the deeper dark. As her eyes adjusted, the line of it sharpened, the grain of the old wood showing as faint shadows within shadow. She focused on it, as if the lines could steady her, could anchor her in something simple and known.

That’s when she saw it.

At first, she thought it was a trick of light, a moonglow that wasn’t there catching on the vine that always climbed the tower’s outer stone and pressed its way into the crack between frame and wall. The vine had been a comfort all summer—small leaves like hearts, bright and cheerful, replacing themselves each time the wind tore one loose. In the faint seam of light, a portion of that vine looked wrong.

It looked gray.

Elara pushed herself up slowly, as if any quick movement might scatter the fragile edges of what she was seeing. Her bare feet found the chill boards. She went to the window and lifted one of the shutters, careful not to let it creak.

The vine was there, pressed close to the glass, its curling tendrils stilled. But the green was gone. The section that had crept onto the frame was leeched of color, not brown with the honest dry of autumn, not black with rot. Gray. The kind that wasn’t a color at all, that made the rest of the room look too saturated, too alive. She touched the pane lightly. Cold bit her fingertip.

She squinted and saw the exact place where the change began. A leaf half-caught in it was split between worlds: one side a healthy matte green, veins feathering like rivers; the other the dull gray of old ash, veins standing out as thin, dark threads. The line between them was precise. The gray side had sunk a little, the flesh pulled tight over a shape that had once been full, like a cheek hollowed by fever.

Her breath fogged the glass and she wiped it away with the base of her palm, irritation rising hot and immediate to cover the colder feeling underneath. She slid the latch and pushed the shutter open. The night air tasted of damp stone and fading embers from the green. The vine brushed her wrist, and she jerked at the contact, even though she’d reached for it.

She took the leaf between her fingers. It should have flexed, bending softly under the pressure. The green half did, compliant and springing back when she eased her grip. The gray half crumbled. Not into dust—into a fine flake that broke along the vein and curled away, leaving a thin skeleton in her fingers. The fragility of it shocked her more than if it had rotted to slime. It had been taken from within.

Elara’s stomach tightened. Am I doing this? The thought came uninvited, and the echo of it filled her chest. She made herself breathe and took the stem of the vine instead, just below the discolored section. It was cool. She could feel the tiny pulse of sap—no, she could imagine it because that’s what stems felt like—no, she could feel something, a faint hum like the tick that should have been in the chronometer, only this was in the wrong place and wrong way, thin and dragging. She pulled her hand back as if she’d touched a hot pan. The wrongness snapped like a rubber band up her fingers.

She stood there for a heartbeat and then reached again, this time letting her awareness curl around the plant like she would around a stubborn flame to coax it to catch. A careful trickle of magic went with her touch, unformed, more intention than spell. She didn’t say any words. Words felt too loud. She just thought on warmth, on staying.

The cold tugged in answer. A tiny shiver traveled through the stem, away from her toward the gray. Elara caught her breath, not sure if she was making it worse. The leaf didn’t regain color. It didn’t worsen in that instant either. The thought of forcing something—forcing time?—through a vine made her throat close.

She let go. The night smelled sharper. She rubbed her hand against her thigh to dispel the residual feeling, as if she could push the sensation out through skin into the wood of her nightdress and lose it there.

Her eyes adjusted to more detail in the dim. The gray threaded farther than she’d first seen, stretching along the frame and disappearing into the gap where the vine slipped behind the plaster. It had a direction. It had a hunger. She imagined it sliding quietly down the outside wall, inch by inch, and into other things—into roots, into the soil. Into people.

Master Valerius had said nothing like that today. He’d kept his voice measured when she’d fumbled and left her standing with the not-quite spell in her hands. He’d looked old for a moment when she’d glanced back across the green, his lined mouth thin, eyes somewhere far away. The memory of his face sat beside the chronometer’s frozen glass in her mind, two still surfaces she could not see under.

Elara closed the shutter until the wood met the frame and set the latch. It felt petty, shutting out a thing that had already come in. She leaned her forehead against the cool wood anyway and stayed there, letting the smooth grain give her a point to focus on. She counted to twenty and then fifty, waiting for the rush in her body to crest and recede.

When it settled, she stepped back and looked at her room in the dark. The bed was a soft shape, the table a rectangle with a deeper rectangle atop it where the chronometer waited. The thought of its stopped hands made her chest hurt in a way that wasn’t sharp, just long. She went back to the bed and slid under the blanket, pulling it up to her chin, feet curled in on themselves against a cold that didn’t come from the night.

She turned on her side again, facing the window. The shutter held, a flat plane making a shadow like a closed eye. She watched it until her own eyes stung. Between one blink and the next, she saw the vine again as it had been for months, bright and ordinary, lifting toward the light. In her mind she set the chronometer back in the center of its cloth. In her mind, the second hand tapped, steady and sure.

Her heart took a while to accept the rhythm. She breathed slow, shoring herself against the press of a world that felt as though it had shifted half a degree under her feet. When her eyelids finally slid down, sleep came not as a surrender but as a narrow hallway she agreed to walk.

Behind the shutter, the gray held its line, quiet and exact, draining color one vein at a time. In the last thought before she drifted, Elara understood with a clarity that made no room for denial: whatever had brushed her in the gears and in the air by the fountain had brushed the village too. And it had touched her window like a hand. She curled her fingers into the blanket and, in the dark, kept them there until the tightness eased. Only then did she let herself let go.

Kael woke before the sun and found his boots by touch. The barracks were quiet except for the soft breathing of men who’d bedded down late after the festival. He didn’t bother with breakfast. By the time the first smear of light bled into the east, he was already at the north fields with two of his best, Rolan and Merev, keeping a step behind.

What had been green yesterday lay in uneasy stillness. Dew silvered the dirt, but the plants themselves didn’t hold it; the droplets slid off leaves that looked dull and thin, as if something under the skin had been drawn out. He stepped over the low boundary hedge into Hadden’s plot. The farmer himself waited, hat clutched, pushing his mouth flat to keep it from shaking.

“You said this happened overnight,” Kael said.

Hadden nodded. “Last I walked it, near dusk, everything was right. This morning…” He lifted his hands, palms up. “It’s like the life just slipped away.”

Kael crouched and touched a carrot top. The leaf should have been firm and slightly rough under his thumb. It flaked at the edges. He pinched the stem and it dented without spring. He tugged one of the carrots from the soil; the root came up too easily, a color too pale, flesh fine and brittle like old paper. He broke it cleanly in half with two fingers. No moisture beaded at the break.

“Any pests?” Kael asked. “Signs of rot? Mold?”

Hadden swallowed. “No bite marks. No smell, Captain. Just… this.”

Kael straightened and signaled Merev to start a perimeter sweep. He looked past the hedgerow toward the river. A light mist lay low over the ground. “Anyone sick?” he asked without looking away.

“Not sick. Tired,” Hadden said. “My Els says her bones ache like winter. I told her it was the dancing, but—” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They moved from field to field, the cases piling up. At Mara Tolen’s, the bean vines hung limply, their pods turned a chalky gray along their seams. She kept wiping her hands on her apron, a smear of dirt appearing and disappearing as if she couldn’t remember she’d already done it. “I checked them late,” she said. “After the little ones were down. They were fine. I could see the moon on their leaves. Then I woke, and it felt wrong in my house. Quiet, like before a storm. I came out and—”

Kael let her stop. He kept notes in his head, mapping the edges of the damage. It wasn’t a circle, not exactly. Patches of normal green broke the lines, a stubborn tangle of healthy squash here, a stand of barley there that still shone with life. But the blight ran like veins between them, thin at first and then widening, and always with that same change at the edges—precise, as if a line had been drawn and everything inside it had aged without the rest.

At Joran Pell’s orchard, the change was sharper. Apples that had been nearly ripe now looked like they’d sat in storage for a season too long. Their skins had sagged and dulled without a bruise in sight. Joran picked one and crushed it in his fist with an expression that made Kael look away for a breath. “I had buyers coming next week,” he said. “They’ll think I’ve watered them down or kept them past. Who’s going to take apples that taste like yesterday’s breath?”

“Did you see anyone near your property?” Kael asked. “Any lights? Hear anything?”

Joran spat to the side. “You think my neighbors would do this?” His anger flared and fell flat. “No. I sat outside after the last of the music. Fell asleep in my chair. Woke when the dawn birds would’ve started. They didn’t sing.”

Rolan drifted close and stood at Kael’s shoulder. “South ridge is clean,” he murmured. “For now.”

Kael nodded once. His mind drew lines between the orchards, the root fields, the bean rows. It wasn’t a wind pattern. It wasn’t water—he checked the stream that ran the length of the eastern plots, and the plants right at the bank looked as bad as the ones on the rise. He knelt and dipped his fingers into the flow, brought them to his tongue, tasted only cold and silt.

By midmorning, voices carried through the fields as others came to walk their land and found the same hunger had passed through it. They called out to one another, voices tight with a need to not be alone. Fear had a sound he knew. This was quieter than fear, a scraped-out place where words couldn’t get purchase. He moved among them with the steady weight of command, asking the same questions again and again.

“Anything out of the ordinary?”

“I heard my clock stop in the night,” one woman whispered, then flushed at how foolish it sounded. “It’s nothing,” she added quickly. “It’s nothing.”

Kael tucked it away with the rest. He pressed the heel of his hand once against the back of his neck where a tension headache had started and then dropped it. He had seen blight. He had held crops slimed by fungus and watched beetles strip a field to lace. This was neither. This was subtraction without process, as if something had measured each stalk and quietly taken what made it itself.

Merev returned from the farthest plots. “Captain,” he said, low. “The old weirwood stand by the north ditch—it’s worse there. Not just crops.”

Kael didn’t waste movement. He set his jaw and walked, their pace clipped and efficient. The weirwoods had been there since before his grandfather’s father, their white bark smooth as bone, leaves a deep green that never fully left even when snow fell. He stepped into the grove and felt it in his body like stepping into a cold room. The air bit without wind. The leaves above were duller, their edges crisped to gray in a way that didn’t bend the branch but stole the shine from them. A single leaf dropped near his boot, turned once in the light, and hit the earth with the dry sound of paper. He crushed it between his fingers. It powdered at the vein.

Rolan swore under his breath. Kael said nothing. He looked at the pattern marching up the trunk—no rot, no insect bores, no fungus threads. Just color drained from the world in a shape that was too neat.

He turned back toward the fields. The farmers waited at the edge of the grove, hats in hands, faces set. He lifted his voice enough to carry. “We’re going to take counts,” he said. “Section by section. Move healthy stock to the square. Don’t touch what’s gone off more than you have to. Rolan, organize the lifts. Merev, I want runners to the healers. If anyone feels more than tired, you send for me.”

“And if it spreads?” Hadden asked, a raw edge to it.

“It is spreading,” Kael said, keeping his tone flat and controlled. “We’ll get you answers.” He didn’t add from where. He didn’t say he had none. He let authority do what it could—shore the edges.

As the men moved, Kael stood a moment longer in the thinning shade. He watched the leaves that still held their color and the precise line where they didn’t. He thought of the village wall and its wards, of the tower and the old man in it. He thought of the way the morning had been oddly quiet, as if the day were holding its breath.

“Captain?” Merev waited, ready for the next order.

Kael nodded toward the road. “Master Valerius,” he said. “Now.”

Master Valerius answered his door with ink on his fingertips and the distant look of a man interrupted mid-thought. He took one glance at Kael’s face and didn’t ask for pleasantries. “Where?”

“The north fields. And the weirwoods.” Kael stepped back to let the old mage pass, and Valerius swept up his satchel, already buckling it closed as he moved. He was leaner than his robes made him look, his hair mostly white, bound at the nape. His eyes, when they focused, were very sharp.

They walked without speaking through streets that felt dim even in clear daylight. News traveled faster than feet. People paused in their doorways, eyes following the pair the way eyes follow a doctor who has been called to a sickbed.

At Hadden’s plot, Valerius knelt without preamble. He pinched a carrot top, as Kael had done, and frowned. He cut a thin section of leaf with a small knife and held it up to the light with tweezers, turning it so the seam caught the sun. He sniffed, pressed, tasted a thread along the midrib, then spat into the dirt with delicate distaste. He sifted a bit of soil from the root bed and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, feeling the grit and the way it clung to his skin.

“Not fungal,” he murmured. “No exudate. No blackening.” He slid a glass from his satchel and peered at the leaf through a lens, checking for mites, boring patterns, anything that made sense. The glass showed veins, cells, structure intact—just dull.

Hadden hovered at the edge of the row, hat twisting hard between his hands. “Master?”

Valerius looked up at him and softened his mouth. “It’s not a rot I recognize,” he said. “It isn’t a thief we can catch with traps.”

Kael gestured toward Mara Tolen’s beans, where the pods lay limp and chalk-edged. Valerius moved to them and repeated the process, slower now. He pressed his palm to the stem and closed his eyes, and when he opened them there was a quiet that hadn’t been there before, something set back in him.

“At dawn,” he asked Mara, “did your house feel colder than it should have? Not a draft. A stillness.”

Mara blinked. “Yes,” she said, surprised to be understood. “It felt—empty. The clock in the front room… it stopped for a breath. Then it went on.”

Valerius tucked that away with the same small nod Kael had used earlier. They moved to the orchard. Joran watched the mage with his arms folded, anger curdled into a stiff kind of control. Valerius cut a neat wedge from one sagging apple and pressed it between two fingers. The flesh collapsed without moisture. No rot. No scent of vinegar or sweetness gone wrong. Just absence.

“Can a curse do this?” Kael asked, keeping his voice low. He stood close enough that the question was for Valerius’s ears alone. “Something cast over the fields? You’ll tell me if I need to put men on the walls.”

Valerius didn’t answer at once. He was looking at the roped-off edge where healthy trees met the dulled ones, studying the line. Finally he said, “Curses are messy. They leave residues, threads a trained hand can feel.” He spread his fingers a fraction as if to catch something in the air. “This is… tidy.”

Kael’s jaw tightened. “Then what?” He couldn’t work with tidy.

“I don’t know,” Valerius said, and Kael believed him. It wasn’t an excuse. It came out careful, chosen. “Yet.”

They cut across the fields to the weirwood stand, and the temperature shift met them a pace before the first trunk. Valerius stopped so abruptly Kael nearly went past him. The mage lifted his hand and brushed the bark with the back of his fingers the way one touches a fevered brow. His lips pressed together. He stood long enough to mark the silence.

“These have held winter and drought,” Valerius said, almost to himself. “They remember more than we do.” He pressed his palm flat to the bark and closed his eyes again, not to listen to sap or song, but as if he were trying to align with an unseen tide.

Kael let him have the quiet. He watched the old man’s breath slow, watched the way his shoulders lowered, not from ease but from settling into a place where he could think. Around them, the farmers kept their distance, the murmur of their voices falling away until it was just leaves and the scrape of a boot.

When Valerius opened his eyes, lines had deepened in his face. He slid his hand down from the bark and wiped his palm on his robe, subconscious and useless. “The flow is wrong,” he said softly, then louder when Kael tilted his head. “The seasons are not a page we turn; they move like a current. They should be distant here, layered. There is a balance you don’t feel until it goes off. This—” He gestured at the greyed leaves, the powder in the prints of Kael’s boots. “—is an imbalance. Something is pulling. Not rot. Not poison. Time.”

Kael’s attention sharpened at the word. It touched a thought he didn’t have a place for. “Time.”

Valerius lifted a hand, already hedging, already retreating from the cliff of his own words. “We speak in metaphors when we don’t know enough,” he said, turning it. “I don’t mean hours or days slipping like sand through an hourglass. I mean… the pacing of things. Growth, rest. The simple fact of a thing being itself at the rate it should. Imagine a song played too fast in some measure and too slow in another. It still finishes, but it is wrong in the bones.”

Kael stared at him. “Can it be fixed?”

Valerius drew a breath and let it out. “If it is what I think, it is not a pestilence a salve can heal. It is a disturbance in the pattern. Sometimes those right themselves. Sometimes they…” He searched for a word that didn’t frighten. He failed. “Sometimes they don’t.”

“Is someone doing it,” Kael pressed, “or is it… weather?” He wanted an enemy he could name.

Valerius’s eyes flicked to the far line of the tower, then back. “There are old forces that shift when pushed,” he said. “Harvests can be coaxed, storms can be called. But this does not feel like a hand at our backs. It feels like a misstep that turned a dance.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m speaking like a fool.”

“You’re speaking like a man who doesn’t want to say it straight,” Kael said, not unkindly.

Valerius met his gaze. For a beat the guardedness dropped, and Kael saw the depth of the man’s worry. “We live by the flow of seasons,” he said plainly. “It feels unbalanced. I will search the records. I will test what I can test. Tell your men to move what remains strong to the square, keep people warm at night, and if anyone—anyone—shows signs of sudden exhaustion, call the healers. And keep the children in, after dusk.”

Kael absorbed the list, filed it, already turning it into action. “That last—why after dusk?”

“Because cold settles,” Valerius said, the evasion softening into something like a plea. “And whatever this is settles with it.”

Kael nodded once. He could order warmth and curfews. He could give people something to do with their hands. He didn’t like the way the mage’s answers slid away from names and into shapes.

As they left the grove, Valerius touched the weirwood again, a quick brush of knuckles like a blessing or an apology. At the edge of the field, he paused, the lines around his mouth tightening as if he’d almost decided to add something and then thought better of it.

“You’ll keep me informed,” Kael said.

“I will,” Valerius answered. “And you—if you see a pattern I’ve missed, bring it to me.” He looked at the field one last time and then up at the sky, as if measuring the day left to them. “I need to consult the old texts.”

Kael watched him go, the robe’s hem catching on the stubble of a dead row and then lifting free. He turned to his men and began to issue orders, but the mage’s word stuck like a burr under his armor. Imbalance. He didn’t have to understand it to know it was dangerous. He set his shoulder under it anyway, because there was no one else and the day was moving whether he liked its pace or not.

Elara had come to the tower to return a bundle of borrowed candles and a chipped bowl she’d meant to mend. She wasn’t sneaking; she had no reason to. The corridor outside Master Valerius’s study was lined with shelves and scrolls, the old stone always cool on the warmest afternoons. She heard footsteps, low voices. She would have turned back, but then Kael’s voice came through the cracked door, rough-edged and quiet: Can it be fixed?

She stilled without meaning to. The bowl pressed against her hip. She recognized the cadence of Master Valerius’s answers—careful, measured, never admitting what he didn’t know. She leaned closer and the word slipped through the seam of the door like a draft. Imbalance.

The word landed in her chest and stuck.

Her fingers went cold. In her mind, the chronometer on her worktable jolted to life, brass face gleaming, the tiny gears grinding backward when she’d nudged them with a simple mending spell. It had hummed hot against her palm, then fallen still, hands frozen at a time that had never been real. She’d shoved it into a drawer and told herself it was a fluke. She’d told herself a lot of things since the festival.

Imbalance.

She didn’t move. Valerius spoke in the way he did when he was walking a student along a cliff edge without saying so, and Kael pressed with the unyielding patience that made the apprentices stand straighter when he stepped into a room. Elara watched their shadows move under the door and thought of Mara Tolen’s laugh when Elara had miswoven the water ribbon for the children, how the ribbon had kinked and sputtered and died in her hands. She’d shrugged it off and gone to hide in the dark behind the stage. Later, in her room, she’d taken up the chronometer out of habit more than hope. She’d wanted the comfort of small things that went right.

The sound of the gears reversing—soft, precise, wrong—had made her throat tighten. When it stopped, she had lain awake, listening to the night and to her own heart, counting the beats and hating herself for counting.

Now, the word she wasn’t meant to hear made those beats stumble. If time was wrong, if there was a pulling, if the seasons were stepping out of time—she didn’t breathe for a second. What if the tug had started with her? What if that ridiculous little surge of magic, that stupid impulse to show she was more than the girl who made light charms and cleaned up the workroom, had knocked something loose?

Kael said: Is someone doing it?

Her feet went numb. She pressed her back to the cool wall and swallowed.

Valerius’s answer was soft and not soft. There are old forces. Missteps. He sounded like he did when he thought he was alone, when he let his voice drop and his shoulders slope. Elara felt a swell of shame so sharp it burned at her eyes. She was old enough to know better. She had been trained not to touch certain texts, not to tug at threads she didn’t understand. And yet—she hadn’t meant to. The spell at the festival had been a water-weave any adept could have done with a hand behind their back. The chronometer had been a simple mend.

When the footsteps shifted and the conversation moved toward the door, Elara stepped back fast. She turned and fled the corridor, her breath tight in her throat, the bowl clutched awkwardly to her chest. She ducked into a side stair as the door opened. Kael’s heavy tread and Valerius’s lighter one passed close enough that the air moved. She held herself still, the stone biting her shoulder, and only let herself exhale when their voices faded down the main hall.

Her room was three flights up, a narrow space tucked beneath a sloped roof. She shut the door and slid the bolt, then leaned her forehead against the wood. The room smelled faintly of beeswax and old paper. The chronometer waited where she’d left it—buried in the bottom drawer of her desk beneath a folded shawl and a tin of sealing wax, as if she’d been hiding a weapon. She stood at the desk and stared at the drawer pull until the pressure in her chest threatened to break her open.

She pulled the drawer out and lifted the shawl. The chronometer lay there, small and precise and harmless, the brass worn soft where her thumb liked to rest. Her father’s hands had built it for her when she was ten. He had engraved the face with tiny stars and her initials around the rim. He had told her that the tick of it was not magic but the honest dance of well-fitted parts. He’d smiled and said, Some things don’t need a spell to do what they were made to do.

She picked it up and the cold weight settled into her palm. The hands were stopped at a nonsense time—two minutes shy of the ninth hour, both hands misaligned by a hair, as if they’d been caught mid-correction. She swallowed and let her magic move, barely a brush, the way she’d done a hundred times to coax light into a glass or mend a cracked plate. The air around her prickled. The gears inside the chronometer clicked in a sequence that wasn’t a sequence at all. For an instant, the room thinned. The candle flame stuttered without moving. The tiny hand twitched, not forward.

She jerked her power back the way you jerk a hand from a hot pan. The sensation snapped and everything rushed in at once. The candle tilted, as if it had breath. Her stomach rolled. She set the chronometer down like it might hurt her and stepped back, one hand braced on the desk, the other coming up to cover her mouth. A swallow crawled down her throat like a stone.

This is nothing, she told herself. You’re tired. You’re scaring yourself. But the word kept sliding over her thoughts, persistent as grit in a shoe.

Imbalance.

Her window looked over the back garden. In the creeping vine that had always been too bold for its trellis, a thread of grey ran along the green. It had been green yesterday. She remembered it distinctly because she had been stubbornly proud of coaxing the vine to grow in the pattern Valerius liked to see, neat and tidy against the stone.

She pressed her fingertips to the sill. The wood was cool, and some small part of her tried to soak the cold up into her overheated skin. She wanted to go to Valerius, to lift the chronometer into the light and spill it all. She wanted him to tell her she was wrong, that gears sometimes slipped and vines sometimes sickened and she should eat and sleep and stop listening at doors. The thought of his steady eyes seeing right through her made her stomach twist.

If she told him, he would look at her and measure her in a way he hadn’t before. He would take the chronometer and lock it away. He would tell her to stop practicing, to let this lie. He would bring in other mages, older ones, and they would look at her like a breach in a wall. Kael would find out. He already thought of her as a girl who stumbled in a crowd and needed reminders to watch where she was going. If he knew she had touched something she shouldn’t have—it was childish, but the thought made her cheeks burn.

She set the chronometer back in the drawer and closed it carefully. Her hand trembled on the handle. She sat on the bed and laced her fingers together in her lap so they would stop shaking. Her heart didn’t listen.

It’s not me, she tried. It can’t be me. She lifted her gaze to the ceiling and counted the beams. She tried to remember what Valerius had taught her about control: the size of a breath, the way to let a channel open and close gently. She should tell him. She should. But the fear that she had made a misstep, that she had hurt something bigger than herself, pinned her like a beetle.

Outside, the tower bell marked the hour with a small, clear tone. The sound came late, by a breath. Or maybe she only imagined it. Elara pressed her lips together and whispered a promise she wasn’t sure she would keep. Tomorrow. She would speak tomorrow. Tonight, she would keep her hands to herself and her mouth shut, and try not to listen to the sound of a world that felt subtly out of step.

Kael left the study with Valerius’s evasions grinding under his skin like grit. Imbalances in the flow of seasons. Everything in him rejected the phrase. Seasons didn’t flow; they cycled. They obeyed. Men obeyed or there were consequences. He’d built a life on that certainty. The blight in the fields and the hollowed eyes of the farmers told him something had slipped its leash.

He took the long corridor toward the archives, the only place that might give him a pattern he could use. The tower was quieter in that wing, the air cooler, the stone swallowing sound. He descended the last stair, palms still itching from holding dying stalks that had turned to paper in his hands.

The archives door was heavy oak, iron-banded, never truly closed. He pushed it and it opened with a soft drag. Shelves rose like ribs around a dim central table, papers and volumes in careful disarray. A single lamp burned at one end, casting a pool of light over scattered books.

Elara sat in the pool of light, sleeves pushed up, a smudge of ink near her thumb. She was bent over a spread of agricultural texts—annotations on soil memory, harvest records, drought cycles. Her hair had fallen forward, slipping from its low tie. She hadn’t heard him at first. He watched the fine muscles in her forearm tense as she traced a line with one finger, lips moving silently as she read.

His first impulse was to leave her to it and find another table. His second was to note how wrong it was that she was here with the same questions he had, and to consider why she might be looking and what she might be hiding.

She looked up then, startled by his shadow. For a heartbeat, he saw the vulnerability she tried to tuck away—wide eyes, breath caught. Then she straightened, scooting her chair back, spine erect as if he’d caught her breaking a rule.

“Captain,” she said, polite, careful. The title sat between them like a wall. “I didn’t expect anyone this late.”

“Could say the same.” He set his gloves on the table with deliberate gentleness so the sound wouldn’t snap in the quiet. “Valerius didn’t have much to offer.”

Her gaze flicked to the door, then back to him. “I heard.” A flush rose on her throat. “I mean—I didn’t hear much. Just… enough.” She looked down at her notes, aligning a page with the edge of the table. “I thought there might be records. Old incidents. We’ve had blights before. I wanted to see how they… behaved.”

He stepped closer, not crowding, but close enough to read the headings. Crop Rotations: A Century in Silverwood. Weather Anomalies of the Riverlands. A pamphlet on pests with woodcuts of beetles and worms. Harmless. Then, tucked near her forearm, a thinner volume with a title she had turned face-down as if by habit. The spine was worn, letters faded. He couldn’t read it from this angle. The hairs along his arms lifted.

“You’re sure this is where you should be looking?” The question came out more pointed than he’d intended. He wasn’t used to softening his words. “The fields aren’t going to be fixed by recipes.”

She flinched, then set her jaw. “I know how it sounds. But history leaves patterns. If we see a pattern, we can prepare.” Her fingers smoothed a margin, a nervous sweep. “It might tell us how quickly it spreads, or if certain soil holds longer.”

He looked at her hand, at the small ink smear. She’d been here awhile. A wet strand of hair clung to her temple. She was tired in the way of someone who had been carrying herself too rigidly all day.

“What did you find?” he asked, flattening the edge of his tone.

She seemed surprised he’d asked. “Nothing that makes sense yet.” She tapped a column of dates in a ledger. “There was a dry year seventy-two years ago. Yields down. But it was heat, not this. This is… cold. It steals color.” Her voice softened on the last word, like it had slipped out unguarded. “Have you—” She cut herself off, chosen question too personal. “What did Master Valerius say, truly?”

“That the seasons lost their footing.” He picked up the ledger she’d indicated, pretended to read while he watched her from the corner of his eye. “That old forces misstep. He didn’t say who pushed them.”

She swallowed. The room held, quiet and compressed, the lamplight gilding the curve of her cheek. She smelled faintly of beeswax and the dry dust of pages. He imagined her earlier, on a stair, listening. He didn’t like the image of her pressed against stone to avoid him. He didn’t like how that made him feel.

He set the ledger down and reached for the face-down book. “What’s this one?”

Her hand moved quickly, palm covering the faded cloth before his fingers reached it. The gesture was quick, small, not defiant exactly, but protective. “Just… theory. Nothing useful.” Her eyes were wrong when she said it, too bright, too still. He felt suspicion turn in him like a key in a lock.

“Theory on what?” He kept his voice even, a question on patrol rather than a threat.

She hesitated. When she spoke, it was a little too light. “Weather. Seasons. The way certain enchantments can—interact.” She slid the book, under her palm, toward the edge of the table and then, with a movement that looked casual if you didn’t know to watch for tells, angled it toward a stack as if to tidy. He saw, just for an instant, the hint of a word on the spine—Tempo—before it vanished under agronomy.

He let out a slow breath. “Master Valerius keeps his forbidden texts in a locked case.” He reached for his gloves and pulled them back on, not looking at her, not looking at the stack. “Be careful you don’t mistake curiosity for command.”

She stiffened at that. He saw it in the square of her shoulders. “I know the rules.”

“Do you?” The question was soft. He regretted it as soon as he heard it out loud. She wasn’t one of his guards; he wasn’t walking a line with a sword tip at her back. He eased his stance. “I’m not here to take books away from you. I’m here because the northern field died between morning and noon. Because Mara Tolen’s eyes are swollen from crying.” He met her gaze, let her see the steady line of his resolve. “If you know anything that can help me keep this from spreading, I need you to say it.”

Her throat worked. For a fleeting second, he thought she might tell him something, the way her mouth parted, the quick flash of fear. Then she shook her head. “I don’t. I just want to help.”

He nodded once. He believed that much. Wanting to help and knowing how were different things. He wasn’t sure if she knew the difference yet, or if she had already crossed it and wasn’t ready to admit the cost.

He reached past her, deliberately slow, and picked up Weather Anomalies. Their sleeves brushed. Her breath hitched—small, involuntary. He pretended not to notice. The heat he felt at the brief contact was unwanted, inconvenient. He ignored it the way he ignored pain in the middle of a fight.

“I’ll take this,” he said. “I’ll return it before first bell.”

She nodded, then added, “There’s a section on sudden fog formations in the back. It’s useless, but—” She caught herself, a bleak humor in her eyes. “Everything feels useless until it isn’t.”

He almost smiled. Almost. “Get some rest, Elara.” It was the first time he said her name without thinking about titles. It felt too intimate in the empty room. He didn’t take it back.

She looked at him as if the sound of it had reached a place she wasn’t guarding. Something unspooled in her expression, then pulled taut again. “You too, Captain.”

He turned for the door. The lamplight pooled behind him. As he stepped into the hall, he glanced back and saw her slide the hidden book deeper under the stack, her fingers careful, guilty. The word he’d half-seen sketched clear in his mind. Temporal. He filed it away, the suspicion cooling into resolve.

He closed the door softly. The corridor felt colder. He had records to read and a pattern to find. And a mage to watch, not as a suspect, not yet—but as someone standing closer to the cliff edge than she knew.

He didn’t go far.

At the end of the hall, he paused in the shadow of a narrow window slit where night pressed black against the glass. The archive door remained ajar, a bar of warm light across the flagstones. He told himself he was checking the corridor, listening for the tower’s creaks he had long ago mapped. What he did was watch that strip of light until a figure moved through it. Elara stood, the chair legs scraping softly. He could hear the faint rustle of pages, the soft thud of a book closed with care instead of haste.

The light shifted as she leaned, and he saw her profile for an instant, mouth set, lashes low as she focused. Her hand slid beneath the top layer of ledgers, lifted the stack just enough to feed something slim underneath. When she straightened the pile, she pressed her palm flat, as if to settle guilt with weight. The movement was precise and practiced. Not the fumbling of a student trying to hide a mistake; the reflex of someone used to tucking dangerous things out of sight.

His jaw tightened. Tempo. The partial word he’d caught rose again, stubborn as a burr. He pictured Valerius’s face earlier, the way the old mage had not answered him by looking at the floorboards. Imbalances in the flow of seasons. His mind supplied the rest the way a soldier supplied missing numbers in a count: Temporal. Temporal something. A discipline the tower pretended it didn’t house.

Elara blew out the lamp. The room fell to grey and then to dark. He stepped back from the window’s square of night and pushed away from the wall before she emerged. When she did, she pulled the door until only a finger-width of light remained, then let it close. It latched with a soft click.

She didn’t see him until she nearly walked into him. Her inhale was sharp. She jolted, a hand rising to her throat, then dropping when she recognized him. “You startled me,” she whispered, a faint reprimand softened by the hour.

“Apologies,” he said. His voice was low too, the quiet a habit of this wing. He let his eyes adjust to the hollows and planes of her face in the dim. “Didn’t mean to linger. Thought of something I needed to check.”

Her gaze slid past him to the door, a small, quick flick. When it returned, it was guarded. “I was just finishing.”

He nodded as if the exchange were nothing. He made himself step aside, giving her room. As she moved past, the scent of older paper and beeswax lifted from her hair. He noticed the tremor in her exhale when she thought he wasn’t listening.

“You were right about patterns,” he said, because silence felt like surrender and he didn’t intend to give that. “They tell you how a thing behaves. They also tell you who it answers to.”

She stopped, the words catching her like a hand on her arm. “You think this answers to someone?”

He kept his tone even. “I think nothing happens without a cause. And I think there are books you’re not supposed to have that talk about causes Valerius doesn’t want to put a name to.”

The color in her cheeks climbed, visible even in low light. “You’re accusing me of what? Stealing?”

“I’m reminding you that secrets get people killed,” he said. “If there’s a study on—” he let the pause sit, a measured step, “—temporal phenomena that explains what I saw in the north field, and you’re reading it, bring it to me.”

Her mouth parted, a protest forming and dying. He watched the struggle move across her face—the reflexive denial, the honest fear, the deep, stubborn thread of responsibility he’d already learned lived in her. She closed her lips on the lie. “I told you. I don’t know anything useful.”

“Not yet,” he conceded. “But you’re looking. Keep looking. And don’t do it alone.”

For a long second, neither of them moved. Somewhere above, a bell hushed to keep from waking novices marked the hour with a soft chime. She broke first, her shoulders easing the smallest fraction. “Goodnight, Captain.”

“Goodnight, Elara.”

She took the stairs lightly, careful not to echo, and turned out of sight. He listened until her footfalls faded. Then he went back to the archive door and set his palm flat to the wood. Cool. He knew the lock from a hundred inspections—simple, out of respect for scholars and not thieves. He opened it and slipped inside.

The room was a darker version of itself: shelves black bones against stone, the air thick with the quiet of sleeping words. He didn’t light the lamp. He didn’t need to. He crossed to the table and let his fingers map where she had pressed. Papers were squared with the care of a mind trying to impose order. He lifted the top ledger. The next. The pamphlet with the insect woodcuts. Underneath, exactly where her palm had settled, a thin spine pressed a shallow groove into the soft grain of the table.

He eased the journals aside enough to expose the book without fully uncovering it. Even a sliver was enough. The title was stamped in faded silver across dark blue cloth, the letters worn where countless thumbs had traced them. The word Temporal was whole here, not a fragment. Temporal Interference and the Mutable Thread.

He did not touch it. He did not have to. The existence of this book in a stack that should have held nothing more controversial than harvest counts was its own answer.

He slid the ledgers back into place, restoring the shape of her lie because it was not yet a weapon he needed to draw. In the corridor again, he closed the door as he had before, gently, the sound hardly more than breath.

The walk back through the tower felt different. He marked small details the way he did when entering hostile terrain: the new scrape on the stair where something heavy had been dragged, the faint scorch along a wall torch bracket, a scatter of wax drips where a novice had hurried and spilled. A place told you what it had endured if you learned its language. The tower’s language tonight was strain.

In his quarters, he set Weather Anomalies on his desk and did not open it. He leaned his hands on the table, head bowed, the muscles in his shoulders drawing tight like wire. The image of Elara’s hand covering the blue cloth played behind his eyes. He could picture Valerius’s keys, the glass-fronted case in the private study where “forbidden” things lived, and he could picture the space on a shelf where a volume might have recently gone missing.

They were hiding something that named what they all felt and refused to say. Temporal. The word had weight in his mouth even unspoken. It explained nothing and everything in the way a blade drawn explained a shift in a room.

If the mages had an answer, they’d locked it away. If Elara had a page of that answer, she was reading alone, shoulders tense, breath careful.

He straightened and unbuckled his chest harness, setting steel aside, the quiet clink steadying him. He wasn’t a scholar. He didn’t need to be. He knew how to read people who stood near edges. He knew how to hold a line.

He would let her keep her fragile advantage tonight. In the morning, he would begin asking questions a different way. He would watch the tower’s doors. He would assign a guard to the fields who knew to report more than footsteps and torches. He would walk the perimeter at the hours when mist gathered low and cold.

And if the seasons had truly slipped, if time itself had been touched, he would not allow the mages to pretend the cliff edge wasn’t there.

He doused his lamp and lay down without undressing fully. Sleep was a shallow, sandbar thing. He rested on it with his eyes open, the name of the hidden book under his breath like a vow: Mutable Thread.

He’d find out who had pulled it. He’d find out why. He’d make sure the next page wasn’t turned without him.